San Antonio’s Multifamily Vacancy Surge: What the Numbers Mean for Real Estate Investors

Fresh Meadows Bookkeeping Services | Market Insights

If you own or manage multifamily properties in San Antonio right now, you already feel the pressure. And if you’re looking at the numbers objectively, that pressure has a name: supply overhang.

As of the first quarter of 2026, San Antonio holds the highest apartment vacancy rate among the 50 largest U.S. apartment markets, coming in at 15.7 percent according to CoStar data. That’s not a minor fluctuation — that’s a headline. It puts the Alamo City ahead of Memphis (15.6%), Austin (14%), and Houston (12.7%). For context, New York City, the tightest major market in the country, sits at just 3.1 percent.

Let’s put that in plain terms: roughly one in six apartment units in this metro is sitting empty right now. If you’re an investor or property manager, that’s not a statistic — that’s lost revenue.

How We Got Here

This didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t a surprise to anyone watching the supply pipeline closely.

San Antonio went through an aggressive development cycle that peaked in 2023 and 2024. At the height of that cycle, nearly 9,500 multifamily units broke ground in a single year. The market absorbed a significant wave of new supply, but demand — even with healthy employment growth — simply couldn’t keep pace.

The result was a vacancy rate that climbed steadily for over three years without relief. While Austin faced a similar dynamic after its own development boom, Austin’s vacancy rate actually began recovering in early 2025. San Antonio’s kept rising, eventually taking the top spot among major U.S. markets in early 2026.

Average asking rents reflect the same story. Rents in San Antonio are running approximately $1,180 per month on average, down roughly 3.3 percent year-over-year, while the national average actually ticked up 0.7 percent during the same period. That spread matters when you’re projecting cash flow.

The Concession Trap

One response operators have leaned on heavily is concessions — free rent weeks, waived fees, move-in incentives. San Antonio ranked third nationally for the percentage of landlords offering financial concessions to attract residents.

Concessions can win a lease. They can also quietly destroy your financial statements if you’re not accounting for them properly. A unit “rented” with eight weeks free on a twelve-month lease isn’t really generating twelve months of rent. Your effective rent is lower, your vacancy cost doesn’t fully disappear, and your books may look stronger than your actual cash position. That gap matters enormously when you’re reviewing performance, refinancing, or preparing for a potential sale.

The Dallas Fed noted that concession packages ranging from six to twelve weeks of free rent have become widespread across Texas major metros, and those packages are expected to continue moderating rent growth well into mid-2026.

Delinquency: The Quiet Pressure Underneath

Vacancy gets the headlines, but delinquency trends deserve equal attention — especially right now.

At the national level, CMBS multifamily delinquency rates climbed to approximately 7.15 percent by mid-2026, well above the 5.44 percent reading from just one year prior. Total distressed commercial real estate volume reached $127 billion in the third quarter of 2025, with multifamily accounting for roughly $23 billion of that.

The Dallas Fed has been watching Texas specifically. While multifamily loan delinquency rates in the state remain below historical crisis levels, the recent uptick is notable — and the combination of elevated vacancy, declining rents, and refinancing pressure at higher-than-original rates creates the kind of environment where delinquency trends can move quickly.

For individual property operators, the delinquency challenge often starts not at the loan level, but at the unit level — residents who are stretching to cover rent in a softening economy, particularly in affordable workforce housing. When multiple residents fall behind in the same quarter, even a small property can feel it across the P&L.

Where the Opportunity Lives

Here’s the part that gets overshadowed by the difficult headlines: this market is in the early stages of a meaningful correction, and that correction points toward stabilization.

New construction starts in San Antonio collapsed by approximately 80 percent in 2024 — from roughly 9,500 units breaking ground to under 1,900. That is a dramatic pullback. And because construction takes time, that slowdown won’t show up as fewer deliveries until 2026 and 2027. When it does, fewer new units entering a market with solid underlying demand should allow vacancy to tighten.

CoStar projects San Antonio’s vacancy rate declining to 15.1 percent this year, 14.4 percent in 2027, and 13.7 percent in 2028. That’s a gradual recovery, not a sudden snapback — but a recovery nonetheless.

Employment fundamentals support it. San Antonio’s unemployment rate as of April 2026 sits at 3.8 percent, below both the state rate of 4.0 percent and the national average. The metro added over 23,000 net jobs in a recent twelve-month period, with major projects like JCB’s $500 million manufacturing facility on the south side set to add 1,500 jobs when it opens. Population growth remains steady, and the metro’s relative affordability continues to draw households priced out of Austin, Dallas, and coastal markets.

Submarkets aren’t uniform. Areas like Far Northwest San Antonio and certain North Central corridors have shown more resilience. Institutional investors have already been targeting properties in these higher-performing pockets while the broader market softens.

What This Means for Your Books

Whether you’re working through the current vacancy environment or positioning for the recovery ahead, the financial discipline required right now is the same: your numbers need to tell the real story.

That means tracking effective rent versus asking rent. It means monitoring your actual days-vacant per unit, not just your reported occupancy rate. It means understanding your delinquency exposure at the unit level before it shows up as a cash flow problem at the property level. And it means keeping your operating statements clean enough that you can see clearly where performance is eroding — and where it’s holding.

This market rewards operators who know their numbers. The ones who are flying blind on their financials are the ones who will be surprised when the refinancing conversation comes around.

If you’re a real estate investor navigating this environment and you’re not sure your books are giving you the clarity you need, that’s exactly the kind of problem we solve every day at Fresh Meadows Bookkeeping Services.

Fresh Meadows Bookkeeping Services provides specialized bookkeeping for real estate investors across the country. We understand the nuances of property-level financial reporting because we’ve worked inside these industries — not just alongside them.

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